Maandelijks archief: maart 2018

Love was one of the people. If such a process-contravening all accepted theory-had in fact occurred, then uranium might be found not only in hydrothermal settings but also in sedimentary basins. When Love proposed a search of Wyoming basins, hydrothermalists in the United States Geological Survey not only mocked the project but attempted to block it. So goes, sometimes, the spirit of science. The tuffs of the Oligocene were a part of the burial of the Rockies, and most had been removed during the exhumation. Love looked around for sedimentary basins where there was evidence that potential host rocks had once been covered with tuff. He had a DC-3 do surveys with an airborne scintillometer
over the Powder River Basin. Some of the readings were remarkably hot-notably in the vicinity of some high-standing erosional remnants called Pumpkin Buttes. He went there in a jeep, taking with him for confirming zakelijke energie vergelijken consultation the sedimentologist Franklyn B. Van Houten, who has described himself ever after as “Dave Love’s human scintillometer.” Love wanted to see if there had been enough fill by Oligocene time to allow the tuff to get over the buried Bighorn Mountains and be spread across the Powder River Basin. He and Van Houten climbed to the top of North Pumpkin Butte and found volcanic pebbles from west of the Bighorns in Oligocene tuff. Then Love went down among the sandstones of the formation lying below, where, at many sites, his Halross Gamma Scintillometer gave six thousand counts per second. In time, he and others developed the concept of roll fronts to explain what he had found. In configuration, they were something like comets, or crescent moons with trailing horns-convex in the direction in which groundwater had flowed. As Love and his colleagues worked out the chemistry, they began with the fact that sixvalent uranium is very soluble, and in oxidized water easily turns into uranyl ions. As the solution moves zakelijke energie down the aquifer, a roll front will develop where the water finds an unusual concentration of organic matter. The organic matter goes after the oxygen. The uranium, dropping to a fom;-valent state, precipitates out as U02-the ore that is called uraninite.